


All Beyond Was Silence

by Zelos



Series: Absolution's Grace [1]
Category: Captain America (2011), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, I guess this is growing up, Loss, Male Friendship, Manhattan Project, People don't change the way we want them to, Post-World War II, World War II, realities of war, tragedies of war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:06:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zelos/pseuds/Zelos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>But the men (and woman) he knew were all dead and gone, and there would be no answers gained from conversations with ghosts.</p>
</blockquote><p>Steve visits the grave of a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Beyond Was Silence

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sister story/sequel to [They Came Sailing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/474603).

_They say we won._

He'd been reading the files SHIELD amassed for him (“the most important things you missed,” Coulson had called it, and Steve had stared and wondered how one can condense 70 years of humanity into a stick smaller than his thumb). Steve'd skimmed most of the contents, focusing mostly on historical events than on cultural updates; SHIELD didn't want him to dwell on the past, but their best writers couldn't make sense of Lady Gaga for him whereas history he could understand.

As a soldier, he understood war – understood it, and wished he didn't; his inner bruised romantic had hoped against hope (he really knew better, or should) that everyone else'd survive the war and settle down with a dame and have the picket fence and two kids and the rest of the American Dream. Maybe World Peace was too much to hope for, but surely they'd get that. They were _owed_ that much.

World War II was _supposed_ to be the war to end all wars. They'd promised them that. They fought, bled and died for that promise, every single one of them.

Falsworth, Jones, and Dugan got killed in action during the D-Day invasion of France.

Morita lost a leg two months after Steve'd sank, and was discharged from duty; pneumonia took him at 38.

Dernier went MIA during a raid in Italy; his body was never identified.

Peggy survived the war but disappeared some time after, likely sent on some espionage mission that she never returned from. Either that, or he didn't have the clearance for SHIELD to tell him the details.

Howard had died too – years and years later, after Stark Industries launched off the arms dealing from the war, and Steve might've called him a war profiteer if he was a lesser man. _Car accident,_ the files said, but the flatness of once handsome features and sombre set of his face told Steve that Howard had died years before he shuffled off the mortal coil.

Two bombs with disarmingly cute names had ended the war to end all wars (except it hadn't been), and ended 246,000 people, and those were just the numbers from the acute effects. “I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” Truman had said, but Steve didn't think he did. The American people certainly didn't, back then.

_They say we won. They didn't say what we lost._

“JARVIS. Tell me more about the Manhattan Project.”

Steve didn't understand the technical explanations, but with the pictures, he didn't need to: skin, peeling off charred bones, ghastly remains of what had once been faces. Seared bodies and smoldering corpses, the brittle skeletons crunching underneath marching boots. Most of them had been _citizens_. Most of them had been _innocents_.

There was a long list of names citing the credits (condemnations) of those responsible, from the planning to the execution to the creation of the atomic bomb. Steve scrolled through the list, and did not have to look very hard to find the name.

_Howard Stark, Chief Developer and Engineer_

After he'd finished throwing up, Steve (calmly, quietly) asked JARVIS where Howard was buried.

They'd won, but all of them had lost.

 

The gate creaked at his entry, the only sound to mark his passage. His silent, measured steps lead him through the winding soggy path, to the marble statuary that marked the resting places of Howard and Maria Stark. The angel was really a little ostentatious, and Steve didn't think Howard would have approved of the severe lettering carved into the stone. Too sombre, too gloomy, too unlike the engineer with the Cheshire smile and snapping eyes and weapons of mass destruction in his nimble hands.

“Hey, Stark.” Steve inclined his head lightly toward's Maria's inscription. “Ma'am.” The flowers were set down.

It was odd, to look at the markers of their earthly remains. After flying solo behind enemy lines and blowing up his labs more times than could be counted and never getting so much as a scratch, the boys had figured Howard'd either die on an expedition to Mars or end up living forever. Howard had laughed at them and did not disabuse them of either notion. He was among the last of them to rest in the earth, to be fair. And yet.

“I'm sorry I missed you,” or would that be _you missed me?_ “A lot has been going on lately since I...got back, god in heaven, Stark, you wouldn't believe some of what's been going on...” The words tumbled out, laughing and crying all at once and Steve could see (imagine) Howard – _his_ Howard, not the hollow-faced man he'd seen in faded pictures of more recent days - lounging on his own tombstone with sleeves rolled up, amusement chasing exasperation across his face. “There'd been _aliens_ shattering the sky, using Schmidt's rock that you found, and they were going to _nuke_ the city...”

It had been the same callousness all over again, and he briefly wondered why they kept electing cowards as their leaders, ones who'd condemn a city (two cities) to death when they'd done nothing wrong but live.

“Then Tony did this amazing suicidal thing that actually _worked_...”

Steve kept up a continuous chatter of updates, filling in the blanks with _ums_ and _ahs_ and _I-forgot, but-I'll-find-outs_ ; he'd missed far more than Howard had, but he'd reentered the mortal coil and could catch up, and Howard's twenty year loss would just keep on growing. Steve finally has an audience of people (ghosts) who knew him, and _cared_ , not trained professionals politely scribbling in notepads with scrutinizing eyes; he couldn't stop talking, about _everything_ , from the dubious fashions of a dress made of meat to the sixteen million types of Starbucks coffee.

But it always circled back to the present, to the war that never seemed to have ended.

“I can't believe they did that,” he finished, shaken and quiet. “They haven't – not since the war – they would've killed - “

The air chilled between them, sharp with tension and fresh morning dew; Howard's expression tightened, and Maria (her features much older than Howard, because the photographs were the only Maria Steve knew) looked _worn._

“I miss you,” Steve said abruptly into the silence, because he hadn't (he had) meant to open this can of worms. “You – you should've seen him, Howard, Maria,” he didn't have permission, but she'd forgive him, just this once, for the imposition of calling her by name. “Tony...saved them – us – all.”

The comparison hung in the air, unintentional: _you_ killed _them all_.

No one had illusions about what the clever civvie missile man built. But they'd been _soldiers_ , and those had been _citizens;_ Howard knew the difference – he _must have_ known the difference. This was the man cracking sly jabs about fondue and nonchalantly offering advice on women, who'd run for days on caffeine and booze and willpower and to hell with this thing called sleep. He'd swagger into shops with bruised eyes and too-sharp smiles as he strapped them in armour, loaded up their weapons, chattering away like he didn't toss and retch like the best and worst of them every night of that damnable war. Smiling, always smiling, baring teeth, because it was better than crying.

He reached out, ran his fingertips across the carved letters in the stone. Same name, different man. The pictures he'd seen of Howard Stark in the days after looked different in a way that had nothing to do with age. Something had shattered in the man, and Steve wanted, so badly, to reach into the grave and shake Howard by the shoulders and ask him _Why, goddamn it, why?_

But the men (and woman) he knew were all dead and gone, and there would be no answers gained from conversations with ghosts.

The errant breeze gusted past him like unseen, scuffling feet; _presence_ gave way to _stillness_ , and Steve was alone once again. He drew a breath, eyes stinging. “Goddamn it, Howard,” and the name came out as a ragged sigh.

Steve stood there for a long, silent moment, lest he cheat his departed friend of the company he'd spent millions looking for. Questions and memories and the sounds of laughter circled him, glittering eyes over glasses of scotch; Steve balled his fists and tried to forget. Not all that glittered was gold, apparently.

He'd been about to leave when he heard it: a minute shuffle in stance, imperceptible to all without superhuman abilities or Serum-enhanced senses. Steve forcibly relaxed his stance, wiped his eyes, but did not turn around. “Sir.”

“Captain.” Philip Coulson approached, carefully, respectfully, and Steve let him, absurd hope flaring. Because it was their business to know things unknowable, and if anyone was to tell him how Howard went from flirting and smiles and fondue in the face of war, to _this_...

He gave Coulson a moment to study the markers and flowers before he spoke. “What was he like?”

Coulson paused. Steve did not look at him, but he heard the faint surprise threaded through his voice. “You knew him.”

“I...thought I did. But...” The Howard he knew...well, all right, even his Howard would never have made the best father by any stretch of the imagination, but none of his flaws included dropping two nukes on two cities. “They weren't _soldiers_.” The words were hollow and plaintive, as if he could plead Coulson into explaining the versions of Howard into the friend he'd known.

Coulson was silent for a long moment. “I guess they did what they thought was - “

“Don't say it,” Steve snapped, because he couldn't believe that Howard, any Howard, would ever believe that that was _right_.

But he must have, one way or another, because Howard was fully capable of telling any suit to shove it where the sun didn't shine if it suited his fancy. Maybe if he'd stuck more to his morals than his drink, it'd have been someone else worn threadbare rather than a friend Steve no longer knew.

Coulson sighed, a pained, honest sound. “War changes people. Difficult times lead to...difficult choices. They ended the war, at least.”

“Did they?” Steve turned to stare at Coulson, eyes drifting down to where Loki'd gutted him before meeting his eyes again. “What war are we fighting now, then?”

Another megalomaniac, another army to do his bidding, another set of drawn-out battles and dying wounded and suffering of the innocents. Lather, rinse, repeat. They weren't so different, in the end.

“I'm sorry, Captain,” Coulson admitted, softly, resignedly. “I don't know. I guess...you and Agent Carter had a compass to guide you. I think Howard Stark lost his during the war.”

Steve drew a breath, asked the question he was most afraid of. “Was he sorry?” Regret came in various shades; there was a world of difference between regret only so far as _having to_ do it, and the regret of actually _doing it_.

“I don't know,” and Steve thought that was a _no_. “Would it change anything?”

Steve's hands fisted again; there could be no other answer. “No.”

So much had changed in seventy years, but he's still thinking in black and white – the lines of the soldier, my side, their side. _War's over_ , they told him, but he looked at the sombre graves in front of him, and remembered the the charred ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and modern downtown Manhattan, and all he could think was, _is it?_

Very quiet footsteps faded behind him; Coulson was always a man with a clue. Steve was grateful. He may find it in himself to thank him later on.

For now, he stood at the foot of the grave of a man he thought he knew, a man he once called friend, and wept at the bloodied turns their black-and-white worlds took, stained red under the grey Manhattan sky.

Colour's a fable and peace, a fairytale lie. He'll never be free, but he's won himself safe for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> I read a discussion about the different views of Tony and Steve during the Civil War storyline about the Registration Act, and one thing that struck me was that Tony said Steve was so steadfast in his principles that he sees things a little too black and white. I think Steve's view on the atomic bomb would be similar, and it'd be easy to blame Howard (especially as most accounts of him after the war wasn't exactly favourable) even if it's totally unfair. Steve has his own blind spots too; some things one can't accept, even if one understands the motivations (and some things we can't even understand, if we weren't _there_ in the moment.)
> 
> This actually started when [this prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/7293.html?thread=13070205#t13070205) about Howard as a sad, bitter, failing man/father after the war. I started on that, when a plot bunnicula (because they have _fangs_ , damn it) marauded in, “what happens when Steve found out how Howard broke?”
> 
> So, thank you to the anon that told me about Howard and the Manhattan Project; this wouldn't have been written without you. I hope I did Steve and Howard justice, but I suspect I didn't.
> 
> Coulson was supposed to get a bigger part (including a discussion about Howard vs Tony) as this was supposed to have been a Coulson/Steve friendship, but my mental Steve elbowed him out of the way in favour of Howard instead.
> 
> Some lyrics were borrowed, slightly modified, from Seanan McGuire's excellent song "Wicked Girls".


End file.
